The world’s largest supplier of lithography scanners necessary for the production of semiconductor products, ASML, operates in the Netherlands. It relies on migrants not only for its production activities, but also for the training of its future workforce, and the confrontation between the US and China has begun to create problems in this area.
Image Source: ASML
Last year, as Bloomberg notes, citing the head of the Eindhoven University of Technology, Robert-Jan Smits, the US Ambassador to the Netherlands asked the university management to explain why there were so many immigrants from China among the students. This educational institution is located five minutes from ASML headquarters, it works closely with this company and has its own laboratory equipped with the latest lithography equipment for training students. More than a quarter of the university’s students are foreigners, but the university management finds it difficult to determine the proportion of Chinese among them.
As Smits rightly noted, since 2021, US authorities have continuously increased the number of student visas issued to Chinese citizens to study at American universities. He does not deny that the Netherlands has to protect its national security interests, but calls for a more common-sense approach to risk identification. The university is conducting a thorough check of its teaching staff for threats of industrial espionage; at the request of the authorities, Chinese students were also prohibited from undergoing internships at industry enterprises, which were provided for in the training program and were intended for a period of one year.
The Dutch authorities are still discussing a bill that would ban the training of Chinese students in specialties related to areas of activity sensitive to national security. The country’s new prime minister, Dick Schoof, appears to share some concerns about China, so the bans are likely to be approved by the government. At the same time, for ASML itself, the Chinese market remains the most important in terms of product sales, because in the first quarter in China the company earned eight times more money than in the USA, and more than in the EMEA region and South Korea combined.